1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed towards the development of a method to allow improved and more accurate and effective representation of at least part of an organisation and, in particular, to provide a model which allows improved decision making to be implemented with respect to the organisation represented by the model. It should be appreciated that the term “organisation” is hereonin used to mean an undertaking of some form, which may be an endeavour, an initiative, programme, or a legal entity which is publically or privately owned.
2. Prior Art
Increasingly, and particularly with larger organisations, there is a need for the organisation to be able to deliver against its objectives, and, in order to do so the organisation needs to be able to continually plan, communicate and monitor its operations, performance, and achievement of outcomes. This, in turn, poses a need for confident, collaborative, continual, evidence-based decision making, to be performed throughout the organisation. The ability to make such decisions poses a need for effective understanding of the current situation as it evolves, including identification of critical and imperative aspects, the future options, and the implications of adopting each of those options within the organisation.
The need for effective decision making is particularly important in times of financial and economic constraints where the impact of an incorrect decision can be dramatic on the wellbeing of the organisation at the time of the decision being made and/or in the future. Thus, when the focus on effective use of resources is critical, the need to make the correct decisions, or at least to make decisions based on the most practical and accurate model of an organisation, is a high priority, at all levels of the organisation.
The need to manage decision making is known and is an important strategic discipline. In general, conventional decision management approaches are dominated by two diverse approaches, neither of which, in practice, is satisfactory. In the first case, the instinct of one or more persons, otherwise known as “gut feel” (or “military judgement” as it is called in the defence sector) is used which is based on the belief that senior personnel within the organisation are suitably equipped to take decisions based on their subject matter experience or domain knowledge. Absolute trust in this approach has been shown to be a dangerous strategy, particularly in fast-moving times, where unpredictable factors may be at play. At the opposite end of the decision making management approach is the reliance on historical data which issued to make predictions of future events and for the making of decisions computed from data stores using the identification of correlations and extrapolations. Trust in this purely analytical approach has similarly been shown to be dangerous due to the risk of “conditioning on the data”, which enhances convenience but at the cost of accuracy: i.e. it is possible that important contributing factors are omitted from analysis simply because they are not reflected in the currently available data and that the reliability of using historical data in relation to future events which may be exposed to different parameters is shown to be poor.
Known systems which utilise enterprise architecture and modelling are described in patent documents WO0177872, US2004249645 which disclose the concept of enterprise modelling, but assume that the model is structural and is used for generation of software applications (in this case, relating to process control) rather than as a basis for the broad understanding of business and incorporation of performance aspects to provide decision support beyond software design. The use of performance modelling and optimisation is disclosed in patent documents US2007234277, US2008163164, and US2009138549, all of which address the modelling of performance measures for purposes of business decision making, but lack inclusion of enterprise architecture concept to give context and depth to performance considerations. Typically there is no ability to drill down through current performance to investigate contributing business process and associated services.
It is also known from WO2009094290 to include the concept of business modelling with integrated performance aspects, but this does not deal with the breadth of enterprise such that they do not address business process, and/or organisational accountabilities and therefore provide a more formal model to support more mathematical optimisation approach around objectives and constraints. The patent document US2009177625 addresses the concept of query mechanisms to extract complex data sets from information systems, but do not seek to align the results with a general enterprise business model. It is also known to provide systems to provide models of organisation without any dynamic input.
Other patents such as US20080130605 address specific aspects of rule formulation that are relevant to the method described herein, but such patents do not specify any wider method within which rules might be embodied. There are also systems, such as that disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/434,344, which describe a complete software framework for automated decision management. Such approaches focus on the underlying software architecture for decision execution, without addressing the question of how the decision space is formulated. The applicant's co-pending application US20110087614 discloses a system whereby a model of the organisation can be developed and the users of the model are able to access the model in a manner so as to obtain different viewpoints of the organisation via the model which make the model, and the results obtained from use of the same, more relevant to the user.
The aim of the present invention is therefore to provide a system for allowing informed and reliable decision making to be achieved by means of reference to a model which provides a more accurate and realistic representation of the organisation in relation to which the decisions are to be made. A further aim is to provide a system by which the model can be generated, and continually pr periodically adapted, in a reliable manner to represent the organisation accurately.